Final Cut Pro 4, Shake 3

chasingporsches writes "It appears that Apple released Final Cut Pro 4, Shake 3, and DVD Studio Pro 2. FCP4 has great new features, such as updated HD support, but unfortunately the usual hefty price tag ($999 full, $399 upgrade). Shake now has unlimited network rendering, and DVD Studio Pro 2 has a new basic/advanced user interface."

Comments

Check out Soundtrack

[BlueGecko]

One thing not mentioned at all in the summary of the new parts of FCP 4 is the new Soundtrack component, which in my opinion could justify the upgrade and the price tag of the entire suite all by itself. This lets anyone, regardless of musical experience, write fairly complex scores for their movies. Essentially, you get a vast library of super-high-fidelity loops that you can then combine with surprising ease straight into your FCP project. You can see the demos/tutorials here. Note that QuickTime and a fast connection are required.

Price Tag

[SewersOfRivendell]

$999 is hefty? Have you priced an Avid system recently? One with all the features of FCP? Is one such even available?

Adobe Encore DVD

[stubear]

I wonder how Adobe Encore DVD stacks up against DVD Studio Pro 2.

Damn did you see the features?!

[DebianDog]

I am glad I waited on buying Boris Red (titler) and SonicFire Pro (audio creation tool) most of these products features are included now in FCP 4.

PLUS they dropped the price of DVDSP to a "mere" $500 and added themes. Fucking too sweet!

I think I will hold on to FCP 3.0.4 for a while since the iLife fiasco with iMovie.

--
Dan Slagle
Keeper of the "Unofficial" iMovie FAQ

Re:Damn did you see the features?!

[DebianDog]

No really? Did you read my sig? I am an Apple Forum "helper" and run the iMovie FAQ. I am pretty fimilar with the Apple product line-up.

Perhaps I was not clear when I was talking about a "fisaco". I was talking about the crap product it turned out to be if you try and do anything complicated. Especially if that product did not originate in IM ver 3.0.2. I stopped using iMovie, for the most part.

Click here for a current list of problems

Re:Hefty?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to pay for your own laziness, feel free!. It takes nothing more than a little searching and trying out the Free OSS tools (yes, all of them if need be) available to do the job, and perhaps writing a few scripts to customise them to your workflow and you end up with a far more useful setup than simple one "mentally cheap" package that attempts to do it all.

You never spent a day working in a real television production environment have you? I'm not talking about CLI automating workflow/render farm type situations. I'm talking about digital compositing using DVCPRO video feeds directly, or the ability to edit and splice 24P HD and add real time effects.

Lemme guess, you're one of those guys that argues the Gimp is good enough and Photoshop is a waste of money too, right?

Unfortunately, lots of these PRO REAL WORLD production applications do not have OSS equivalents that are anything more than toys.

Re:i failed to mention...

[Graymalkin]

Adobe would charge a lot more for Premiere if it didn't suck in its entirety. If you never had to meet a deadline or didn't mind your project getting trashed all the time Premiere would be a great application. Their Mac port of it is especially poor, as is their port of After Effects which is a sad excuse for a professional application all on its own.

As for shake needing 4 times the hardware, there is where Apple's sales department kicks in. You buy Shake 3 and say Maya and they'll gladly sell you a rack of the cluster specific XServes that you can run mental ray and QMaster network rendering clients on.